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One contributing factor may be the migration of people to these areas from Southern California, says Rob Lang, a leading expert on economic trends who teaches at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. For much of the second half of the 20th century, Southern California was, as historian Fred Siegel of the Manhattan Institute aptly put it, the nation’s “capitalist dynamo.” Unlike Houston with energy, or Seattle and San Jose with technology, the Southern California economy was broad based, spanning everything from aerospace and garments to homebuilding and fast-food restaurants.

Over the past generation, many heirs to this entrepreneurial tradition have decamped to the Sonoran Desert region, which stretches from California into Arizona, Lang says.

Of course, Lang notes, Phoenix has long been disdained by urban aesthetes as environmentally “unsustainable”and doomed to economic decline. Its fate, according to accounts during the worst of the housing crash, was to be surrounded by “zombie sub-divisions” that would remain empty for years, perhaps permanently as the desert encroached.

This recovery, notes local economist Elliot Pollack, follows the typical cycle for Phoenix, led by entrepreneurial activity. “Greater Phoenix is a small business town," notes Pollack. ”Historically, during periods of growth, there is substantial new business and self employment formation."

Phoenix’s self-employment boom suggests that the Valley of the Sun is primed for a comeback. But not all of the top 30 metro areas are seeing anything like this level of new entrepreneurial activity. The 1099 economy has grown at less than half Phoenix’s rate in such “creative” hotbeds as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston. Self-employment is flat in many cities, including St. Louis, Cincinnati and Cleveland, and as actually declined in Kansas City, Chicago and Atlanta.

It may be too early to declare which economies will finally rebound fully from the ravages of the Great Recession. But for my money, I’d look to those places where people are taking the leap to go out on their own as the ones most likely to reinvent themselves when the economy begins expanding robustly again.